commerce essay

Lean Storage And Warehouse Commerce Essay

Published: 23, March 2015

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According to Lean thinking, it would help improve the efficiency of warehouse operations by reducing the waste and duplication, from the following aspects: layout arrangement, material handling techniques and media of transportation. [1]

Warehouse layout design models, designed to achieve warehouse optimization objectives, would optimize the warehouse layout by allocating an economical place to each type of item, [2] which could eliminate the inefficiencies in warehouse operations.

Based on lean thinking, Heuristic approaches are highly attractive than the traditional approaches, which used to identify the most economical storage location for each item type to minimize the handling cost. [3] Furthermore, Heuristics approach would generate a shortest route to collect all items of a respective order, based on the item's priority in the bringing itinerary, distance in between two consecutive types of items and the weight.

On the other hand, A Value Stream Mapping (VSM), which identifies the whole warehouse operation, consists of sub processes such as receiving, storing, and picking, [3] could optimize the warehouse operation in terms of cost and time by eliminating non-value adding activities and optimizing value adding activities.

Lean Production Facility Layout

Lean facility layout means to arrange the physical equipments within a plant to maximize the efficiency of facility production, which could increase the utilization ratio of the equipments, reduce waste of human resources and equipment resources, and improve production efficiency. [3]

Based on the lean technology, 5S is a system of process improvement that is adopted to reduce waste, clean workplace, and improve labor productivity. [4]

The 5S components include Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain. [4] These components work together to provide a methodology for organizing, cleaning, developing, and sustaining a productive work environment.

On the other hand, process flow and layout, designed to arrange the process steps in a natural flow order, could contribute to minimize cycle time and travel distance, and eliminate crossover points.

Lean Supply Chain Management

The most important objective of lean supply chain management is to eliminate waste in materials, human resources and processes within the supply chain, and to provide high value product for the customer, which means lean supply chain would help all the parties within the whole supply chain to achieve low costs, higher quality products and lower lead times. Lean Supply Chain management would manage supply chain processes smoothly and continuously, which could contribute to reduce or eliminate the delays and discontinuities in the supply chain process. For example, it could help reduce the waste of manufacturing time caused by the longer lead-time within the supply chain. Furthermore, Lean supply chain management also helps to identify points that are using unnecessary resources by examining every process within the whole supply chain, which could help to improve the company's competitiveness and overall profitability.

Lean Participate Management

Participative management is used to address the relationship between the company and its workers, which could settle fundamental issues of governance within companies in terms of organizational decision making. In addition to the essential issues of governance and the appropriate relationship between workers and their employers, participate management would contribute to maintain high levels of effectiveness, productivity, and worker motivation in an increasingly dynamic, competitive environment. From this point of view, participative management is recognized as a particularly method for dealing with social, political, and economic issues of low productivity, which could improve product quality and save cost. Furthermore, employees could be involved in decision-making process, supported by participative management, which has been promoted greatly as an efficient way to deal with poor morale and low productivity.

On the other hand, employee involvement could benefit the employees from undertaking more responsibility in their jobs, which could create a deeper sense of satisfaction and higher levels of motivation. Besides, high-involvement management could promote high levels of performance including collective decision making and responsibility.

Finally, lean teamwork, developing and engaging people through their contribution to team performance, could help contribute to the organization's success through effective and efficient communication, coordination, and cooperation within the team.

Lean Six Sigma

Lean manufacturing focuses on improving efficiency of production by reducing waste, while the six sigma concentrates on recognizing and eliminating defects in production process, which accelerates a company's decision-making processes. From this point of view, the main idea for both strives on improving production efficiencies as well as increasing the quality of product.

The lean manufacturing management strategy aims to reduce waste in terms of unnecessary resource during manufacturing, which could contribute to optimize an organization's production process. Similarly, Six Sigma focuses on improving effectiveness of business operations as well as the quality of products by defining, measuring, and analyzing business processes. Besides, the statistical analysis is one of the main methods within Six Sigma business management strategy, used to optimize an organization's production process.

By combing Lean manufacturing with Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma would contribute to effectively improve speed, quality, and cost by reducing unnecessary resources.

OEE

Lean Manufacturing is often described as an approach that identifies the waste and eliminates the waste. Its goal is to improve the efficiency on responding to customer demand by reducing unnecessary resources in terms of human effort, inventory and space. And also, it strives on producing high quality products in the most efficient and economical manner.

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a hierarchy of metrics which evaluates and indicates how effectively a manufacturing operation is utilized. [4] The results, compared between manufacturing units, are used to identify the areas for process performance improvement. Furthermore, Overall Equipment Effectiveness can also improve the performance of machinery and associated processes by identifying performance opportunities that will have the greatest impact to the machinery and associated processes. Besides, improvements in changeovers, quality, and machine reliability can be measured and improved utilizing the OEE metric.

Dock-to-dock time

Dock-to-dock measures the flow of materials through the value stream. It is the time it takes for a component or raw material to go from the receiving dock, through production, and to shipment from the shipping dock. It is the speed of conversion of raw material into a finished product within this value stream.

Improving DTD time improves the company's ability to make on-time deliveries, lowers material handling and inventory carrying costs which in turn leads to lower total cost. This indicator can be applied to the assessment of the whole enterprise, or to the assessment of single production lines or separate product groups. It is used to assess the flexibility and efficiency of the production systems.

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